They had all sorts of excuses, including the one week where the monkey (um, excuse me, technician) put on the ticket that the location was a vacant lot!!
That's very odd because phone companies run lines to vacant lots all the time. One company I worked for would order 5-10 phone lines and fiber routed to vacant lots, or farm fields, or random street manholes probably five or six times a year. We'd use them for about a week and then disconnect.
Usually phone companies will do whatever you want if you throw enough money at them. Glad I've never had to deal with Qwest.
Funny. My AT&T heartache story has to do with moving, too.
I moved from the third floor to the fourth floor of a builiding. AT&T wouldn't move my phone service insisting that there is no fourth floor in my building. AT&T claimed it was only a two-story building, which doesn't explain how it was able to hook up phone my original service on the third floor. AT&T refused to send someone out to verify the building had four stories. One hypothesis they proffered was that it was a new building. Nope. The building is older than AT&T.
I ended up getting Roadrunner and Vonage since AT&T for some reason didn't want my money.
when the local government doesn't hold them back, the phone company bundles and contracts the shit out of you
I've lived in rural areas, so I understand. I don't think it's so much to do with regulation as competition. If AT&T pisses me off, I can switch to one of dozens of DSL, cable, and wireless providers. It's one of the many benefits of living in a big city.
Heck, as recently as a few years ago I lived in a very small town where you only needed to dial five digits to call phone numbers across two area codes in two states (I was 49845). How's THAT for a local phone company doing whatever it wants!
And then get slammed for not using their business serves?
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Lots of businesses, especially small ones, only use port 80. Are you worried that you're not going to use enough different types of internet that they'll crack down on you?
And then the real question, if they can offer me that service for that price, why the fuck won't anybody just sell me a cable or DSL line with more upload bandwidth? I would be willing to pay more.
Tell them you're a small business. I find that if you're already willing to throw money at a telecom problem, they'll do whatever you want if you say you're a business.
To get ATT DSL, you need to sign up for a 1 or 2 year contract, pay an installation fee, and buy their landline service.
Lies and FUD. Did you make this stuff up yourself, or did you see it in a cable company newsletter?
I got AT&T DSL last month with no phone service (I use Vonage -- works great!), no contract, and no installation fee. The only thing I had to buy was the DSL modem for ~$50.
I even ordered it online, where the option to get DSL without the phone line was presented just as clearly as the regular option. No sneaky Dell-style hidden menus and options.
I'm not a big AT&T fan, but you clearly don't know what you're talking about. Or maybe you just live someplace where the regulations are vastly different (FTR, I'm in Chicago).
Are there any DSL providers where that isn't a requirement?
Yeah, AT&T. Contrary to what the reacionary twitchers at/. think, AT&T doesn't require you to have their phone service to get their DSL.
I have no AT&T phone service (the tech called it a "dry loop"), but I have AT&T DSL.
The catch is (at least in my area) that AT&T caps you at three megabits. In order to get their six megabit package you have to sign up for phone service.
I've been with AT&T DSL for about a month. There were lots of problems getting it installed (turns out the problem was that none of the four telephone lines to my apartment were physically hooked up, but only the last tech bothered to go into the building's phone closet to check). But now that it's on, it works well.
I have a plethora of high-speed internet choices where I live. I went with AT&T because it offered twice the speed of Speakeasy and the other resellers at half the cost AND NO CONTRACT. That was the big problem I had with most of the resellers.
Another option would have been Comcast, but the Comcast lady told me that cable internet doesn't work with Macs (which I know is a lie because I've had Roadrunner in the past). She said if I can't install Comcast's software on Windows XP I can't have internet.
In the end, I'm paying around $25/month for three megabits from AT&T that work fine so far.
Comcast would have been six megabits, but for $75/month.
The way I see it, we don't need the "International" corporations of the world.
Damned straight, brotha'. Let's abolish all "international" corporations.
We can start with the Red Cross..
and Greenpeace..
and the United Nations..
and those horrible airlines that have the nerve to have employees in every country where they land..
And the "international brotherhood" known as the Teamsters union.
They will need an iphone 'nano' type model which costs much less to get a 25% share of the market.
It could happen. Remember when 1TB of storage was mythical?
I remember my first hard drive. It was about the size of a full IBM XT box and held a whopping 6 megabytes. Now nanos have 100x the storage in 1/100th the form factor.
Of course the big challenge will be to miniaturize the interfact and user interaction. But I'm sure something will be invented in the next 15 years that none of us have ever seen before.
He said it when he unveiled the iPhone for the very first time at MacWorld in front of the audience. It's on video. Just look at the first video where he demoed the phone and talked about availability. He said America this Spring, Europe with 3G in the fall, and Asia next year.
And I don't think you searched very hard. I found this in my first page of Google results:
"Apple hasn't been especially shy in beating the drums for its long-term 3G plans, as Apple chief executive Steve Jobs himself mentioned 3G in his Macworld keynote and later had his story backed by Cingular (now AT&T) distribution chief Glenn Lurie."
here in the UK, if you don't have 3G then you're never going anywhere
Jobs has already said the European version will be 3G. So... what's your point again?
And while I can't comment on 3G in the UK, in France and Belgium it isn't everything it's cracked up to be. I've done mobile surfing (laptop tethered via Bluetooth) in dozens of cities across both countries, and 3G the coverage is neither plentiful nor reliable.
I know it's not my equipment, because the same set-up works fine with 100% reliability and amazing speed in Asia.
Their estimate is 1% of the smartphone market in the first year. You dictate nothing at one percent.
You are correct -- at 1% you dictate nothing. But my memory differs from yours on this.
I believe what Jobs said was that he wanted 1% of the MOBILE PHONE market -- not just smartphones. I read recently that smartphones are only 4-5% of the ovreall mobile phone market, so 1% of the regular mobile market equals 20-25% of the smartphone market. At those numbers you get noticed.
Again, I may be remembering this wrong. I should look it up, but it's a lazy Sunday.
Only in the US. My network provider lets me run what I want on my phones and currently I have google maps, opera and salling clicker running nicely on my phone together with a couple of small apps I wrote.
I'm in the US and my network provide lets me run what I want. I have Opera Mini, Salling Clicker, SSH, and a bunch of other apps running on my phone with no problems.
Why do you say this is not possible in the US? Oh, right... making shit up about America. You must be from Europe.
If my wife would tolerate getting a new phone number, I'd go with Vonage just to spite Qwest.
You can port your landline phone number to Vonage. I did it, moving a Southwestern Bell number to Vonage a few years back.
OT background: I moved from the 3rd floor to the 4th floor of my building. SBC (now AT&T) wouldn't move the phone, claiming there were only 2 stories in my building. That doesn't explain why they were able to hook up a phone in my THIRD floor apartment in the first place. SBC tried to argue that it must be a new builidng, but the building is over 100 years old and actually pre-dates the phone company. SBC/AT&T refused to even send a tech to the building to verify that it, indeed, has four floors.
Solution: Port my phone number to Vonage on Time Warner cable. Took about three days after I got the Vonage box in the mail.
Over a period of two months, four national ISPs would not give Wired the time of day
So? BFD. I wouldn't give Wired the time of day, either. Wired had promise in the last century, but is nothing more than a hybrid of Ars Technica and People Magazine.
In spite of what the people at Wired think of themselves, they're not the New York Times, or any other news organization with a 100+ year track record of journalism (recent gaffes notwithstanding). They're just a garish tech fanboi rag, and not even a good one of those.
Slashdot Mirror
It turns out, so does AT&T. The tech who finally hooked me up used it because he said the CDROM was too slow.
Which means I never clicked "I accept" on any of AT&T's terms of use agreements.
Hmmm....
Usually phone companies will do whatever you want if you throw enough money at them. Glad I've never had to deal with Qwest.
Funny. My AT&T heartache story has to do with moving, too.
I moved from the third floor to the fourth floor of a builiding. AT&T wouldn't move my phone service insisting that there is no fourth floor in my building. AT&T claimed it was only a two-story building, which doesn't explain how it was able to hook up phone my original service on the third floor. AT&T refused to send someone out to verify the building had four stories. One hypothesis they proffered was that it was a new building. Nope. The building is older than AT&T.
I ended up getting Roadrunner and Vonage since AT&T for some reason didn't want my money.
Heck, as recently as a few years ago I lived in a very small town where you only needed to dial five digits to call phone numbers across two area codes in two states (I was 49845). How's THAT for a local phone company doing whatever it wants!
The United Nations was formed to regulate business? That's news to them!
Also, advocating the slaughter of millions of human beings to support your worldview certainly illustrates what kind of worldview you hold.
I got AT&T DSL last month with no phone service (I use Vonage -- works great!), no contract, and no installation fee. The only thing I had to buy was the DSL modem for ~$50.
I even ordered it online, where the option to get DSL without the phone line was presented just as clearly as the regular option. No sneaky Dell-style hidden menus and options.
I'm not a big AT&T fan, but you clearly don't know what you're talking about. Or maybe you just live someplace where the regulations are vastly different (FTR, I'm in Chicago).
I have no AT&T phone service (the tech called it a "dry loop"), but I have AT&T DSL.
The catch is (at least in my area) that AT&T caps you at three megabits. In order to get their six megabit package you have to sign up for phone service.
I've been with AT&T DSL for about a month. There were lots of problems getting it installed (turns out the problem was that none of the four telephone lines to my apartment were physically hooked up, but only the last tech bothered to go into the building's phone closet to check). But now that it's on, it works well.
I have a plethora of high-speed internet choices where I live. I went with AT&T because it offered twice the speed of Speakeasy and the other resellers at half the cost AND NO CONTRACT. That was the big problem I had with most of the resellers.
Another option would have been Comcast, but the Comcast lady told me that cable internet doesn't work with Macs (which I know is a lie because I've had Roadrunner in the past). She said if I can't install Comcast's software on Windows XP I can't have internet.
In the end, I'm paying around $25/month for three megabits from AT&T that work fine so far. Comcast would have been six megabits, but for $75/month.
I have a lot of reasons to hate the beast that is Southwestern Bell/SBC/AT&T/Ameritech/MegaGiantConHugeCo, but this time around I'm moderately pleased.
We can start with the Red Cross..
and Greenpeace..
and the United Nations..
and those horrible airlines that have the nerve to have employees in every country where they land..
And the "international brotherhood" known as the Teamsters union.
I plan to use the same payment method for my iPhone.
I remember my first hard drive. It was about the size of a full IBM XT box and held a whopping 6 megabytes. Now nanos have 100x the storage in 1/100th the form factor.
Of course the big challenge will be to miniaturize the interfact and user interaction. But I'm sure something will be invented in the next 15 years that none of us have ever seen before.
He said it when he unveiled the iPhone for the very first time at MacWorld in front of the audience. It's on video. Just look at the first video where he demoed the phone and talked about availability. He said America this Spring, Europe with 3G in the fall, and Asia next year.
And I don't think you searched very hard. I found this in my first page of Google results:
"Apple hasn't been especially shy in beating the drums for its long-term 3G plans, as Apple chief executive Steve Jobs himself mentioned 3G in his Macworld keynote and later had his story backed by Cingular (now AT&T) distribution chief Glenn Lurie."
I've never been able to get even the Java version of Google Maps to work right, though.
And while I can't comment on 3G in the UK, in France and Belgium it isn't everything it's cracked up to be. I've done mobile surfing (laptop tethered via Bluetooth) in dozens of cities across both countries, and 3G the coverage is neither plentiful nor reliable.
I know it's not my equipment, because the same set-up works fine with 100% reliability and amazing speed in Asia.
I believe what Jobs said was that he wanted 1% of the MOBILE PHONE market -- not just smartphones. I read recently that smartphones are only 4-5% of the ovreall mobile phone market, so 1% of the regular mobile market equals 20-25% of the smartphone market. At those numbers you get noticed.
Again, I may be remembering this wrong. I should look it up, but it's a lazy Sunday.
It's true, but who cares? What's the big deal?
What's your point?
I think they'd rather pocket more of their money than pay a tax to an anacronism.
Don't get me wrong -- I think some unions are great. Some people really need them. Coal miners. Certain factory workers. Manual laborers.
TV personalities making a million dollars? Nope. That's just shows the greed of the union trying to get a slice of someone else's pie.
Why do you say this is not possible in the US? Oh, right... making shit up about America. You must be from Europe.
OT background: I moved from the 3rd floor to the 4th floor of my building. SBC (now AT&T) wouldn't move the phone, claiming there were only 2 stories in my building. That doesn't explain why they were able to hook up a phone in my THIRD floor apartment in the first place. SBC tried to argue that it must be a new builidng, but the building is over 100 years old and actually pre-dates the phone company. SBC/AT&T refused to even send a tech to the building to verify that it, indeed, has four floors.
Solution: Port my phone number to Vonage on Time Warner cable. Took about three days after I got the Vonage box in the mail.
Upshot: No longer giving money to AT&T.
In spite of what the people at Wired think of themselves, they're not the New York Times, or any other news organization with a 100+ year track record of journalism (recent gaffes notwithstanding). They're just a garish tech fanboi rag, and not even a good one of those.